The Wackenhut Corporation (“Wackenhut” or “the Company”) today filed a civil action against the Service Employees International Union (“SEIU” or “the Union”). The lawsuit is in response to the SEIU’s malicious, four-year, international corporate campaign to force Wackenhut to recognize the Union as the employees’ bargaining representative while denying the employees their federal rights to free choice and a secret ballot election. The SEIU’s top-down, wholesale, organizing attack also would compromise the quality of Wackenhut’s services by forcing the Company to deal with a union that also represents workers other than guards which federal law specifically prohibits as an appropriate unit for representation and bargaining.
UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has a story this morning that does a great job summing up a complex issue:
The company, which provides security at many of the U.S.’s nuclear-power plants, says it has refused to recognize SEIU because it is a “mixed” union that admits janitors, hospital workers and other service workers in addition to security guards, according to the lawsuit. It said it recognizes and negotiates collective-bargaining agreements with “guard-only” unions, except for three situations in which Wackenhut obtained contracts at work sites where mixed unions were already in place.
Wackenhut and its subsidiaries are parties to about 35 collective-bargaining agreements with six guard-only unions, according to the complaint.
See more about the case against SEIU’s ally, the United Food and Commercial Workers.